“You must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” So said Richard Feynman. Feynman as you may know was one of the most famous physicists of his time and worked with Bohr, Einstein, and Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project at the tender age of 24.

How do we end up fooling ourselves? Well, our knowledge of the world around us is far from perfect, in fact, it is very partial. Physicists know this well.

Our senses by which we perceive the world are limited. We see poorly at night, we can only focus our eyesight on a narrow field of view right in front of us, the edges of our vision remain blurred. We can only hear certain frequencies. There is only a certain amount of the light spectrum we see. Our smell is vastly inferior to that of a dog. Most importantly 99.99% of what is going in the world is hidden from us.

Our minds are busy, always on. We need to construct a pattern of the world, so we don’t die. That is the most basic function. So, our incomplete sensory systems are tuned for survival and our brain is mostly wired for that. The other part of survival that our brain takes care of is the wiring that manages our body. You are hungry, so you eat. If you starve yourself the feeling of hunger and the scouring for food is likely to become the most important thing ultimately hijacking your mind. At that moment. That is our wiring. Luckily the body management such as breathing, digestion, releasing chemicals for our cells etc. takes place without our knowledge.

However, incomplete our sensory systems are all the sensory data arrives non-stop in our brain. It is combined with our experience and learnings of the world around us. The combination forms our thoughts and feelings that in turn shapes verbal utterances and our actions.

However, if cognition shapes our thinking, affect shapes our emotions. We tend to think of rational thought as cool and collected and the emotions as hot and to be avoided or “controlled”. It is a common misconception that we have a rational side of the brain and an emotional side. According to Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, this is an outdated view. As she puts it: “We have ONE brain”. There is a belief that we are more in control of…